The eccentricity, the gentleness, the manic productivity, the environmental clean-ups, the rants and the rats are recurring themes when people talk about Morgan Steele. We lost this wild visionary in a car accident on April 23 and his passing drained a lot of light and color from our Orlando world, but oh, how grateful it made us for the many worlds he left behind.

“He wasn’t after money or fame, he just loved making things from garbage and painting his brilliance on old pieces of fence posts,” says artist Doug Rhodehamel. “He was the real deal, and I will miss him.

The documentation that took place at the Winter Park coffee house was constant and consuming: little notes like “Jim Morrison exposed himself for your sins” or “Never feed dog bones to chickens,” and constant sketching that captured what author and photographer Gary Monroe described in Extraordinary Interpretations: Florida’s Self-Taught Artists as “cartoon surrealism,” threaded with “encryptions that, like hieroglyphs, appear codified and impenetrable.”

His satirical edge was “from those years of reading Mad magazine.”

With that as an influence it’s hardly surprising his work was “never elitist,” artist Keith “Scramble” Campbell says, and neither were his prices, “so anyone you talk to, they don’t have one painting, they have five paintings, they have 10 paintings. Shit, I’ve got 100 of them.”